Site Focus
This site is about web development, Amazon links and widgets with WordPress, books I'm reading, and a few tidbits about my dogs and cat. It will also contain short tutorials and tips for using electronic resources at my local public library, where I'm a member of the Friends of the Library organization.Why "Greene Tea"?
Designing pages or writing code always involves a few bumps and slumps. Stepping away from work for a lovely cup of tea helps me take a fresh look at whatever I'm doing, and sometimes "see" the answer to a problem I've been chewing on for a while. Well, anything that gets a person moving is a refreshing change. Walking my dogs works too, but I couldn't very well name the site "Dog Walking for Better Websites" when a shameless pun was available.
About me
I've been making web pages since 1996, starting with a website for Ramsey Library, University of North Carolina at Asheville. It was wild and woolly in those days, but a great opportunity to learn new things. In late-May, 2000, I moved to Reno, Nevada, where I served as Web Development Librarian until the end of June 2008.
My final projects at UNR were a "construction" site for a beautiful new building to house both the main University Library and IT User Services, and a website for the completed Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center. It was hectic, challenging, filled with meetings, working with many new people, and a labor of love. When I "retired," after completing my Magnum Opus, I spent two months working remotely part-time writing documentation and working with my successor. Passing the torch went smoothly, and I've moved on to work on my own projects.
While at UNR, I had a fantastic opportunity to add to my skills and develop new ones with ASP.Net and SQL Server, enterprise tools readily available to our "Microsoft campus."
Now, I'm keeping up by learning ASP.Net 3.5, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008. Of course, in the real world, most websites are created with open-source resources. I signed on here with BlueHost to learn a lot more about WordPress, MySQL, and other tools. No experience is ever wasted, however. Everything I've done in the past is a big help going forward. It's all good.
